


The Plague and the Cure

by eleutheria_has_won



Category: The Underland Chronicles - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Biological Warfare, Cultural Appropriation, Diggers, Disease, Gen, Genocide, Gnawers, Meta, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-08
Updated: 2015-07-08
Packaged: 2018-04-08 08:29:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4297773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>So. Here’s something I bet you haven’t thought about before.</p>
<p>Did the diggers get the Plague?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Plague and the Cure

So. Here’s something I bet you haven’t thought about before.

Did the diggers get the Plague?

> “But what were moles doing in the Underland? No one had ever mentioned them to him before. Surely he would have heard of them when the plague was running rampant because they were mammals — they would have been affected along with the rest of the warmbloods. Could it be that no one knew they existed down here? That they’d been living far deeper in the earth than the rest of the Underlanders and had only just surfaced?” 
> 
>                                         – Gregor and the Code of Claw, Chapter 14

We know that the gnawers got it. We know that the gnawers are in contact with the diggers in some capacity, however many of them there are left. We know that their relationship is at least a somewhat positive one. Enough that, when the war of the Bane started, the gnawers could recruit them into fighting.

So they probably did get the Plague. Except, there was no mention of the cure being given to them. But, I mean, they’re not all dead, so how did they get the cure?

Let’s go back a bit.

Rats and moles aren’t anything close to identical, but out of all the species in the Underland, they look the most alike. Rats and mice are similar, yes, but there’s also a massive gap in size. Rats and moles, however, are about the same size, similar shape, both warmblooded, same usual color of fur and coverage of fur, same number of limbs… by the Underland’s standards, they’re practically the same thing.

So imagine a world before humans. Imagine a world in which diggers still inhabit the prime real estate that Regalia sits on today. Imagine a world in which gnawers and diggers, as the most similar pair of species in all the Underland, reach out to one another like no other species in the Underland would think of doing. Imagine a world where fliers and nibblers exist, but are not connected, and exist on the fringes of power because of it. 

Imagine a world where the Underland is ruled by the diggers and the gnawers, out of the power born of their connection. Imagine a world where the gnawers and the diggers are allies, sworn to be together till the end. Imagine a world where they consider each other cousins, a sibling race… even bonds. 

Imagine a world in which a gnawer and a digger were the first ones to say “our life and death are one, we two.”

Imagine what happens in that world, when a colony of warmbloods like no kind they’ve ever seen, no kind they can understand, descends down from the surface and demand that the diggers give over their homeland so these strangers can settle on it instead. Imagine how angry the gnawers would become on behalf of their bonds, their beloved sibling race, that they should be unfairly, unjustly, unrighteously attacked like this.

Imagine how that anger turns into fury when these strangers begin to push the diggers off their ancestral lands.

Imagine how it turns to horror.

> “Moreover, there shall be a great cry in all the land of Egypt, such as there has not been before and such as shall never be again.” 
> 
>                                                                        – Exodus 11:6

Imagine the grief. Imagine the horror. Imagine the death and the loss. Imagine the shattered lives, the sundered families, the orphaned children and the newly childless. Imagine the few diggers who were visiting their bonds in gnawer land falling into despair, because in one fell swoop, they have become a dying race.

Imagine what the original provocation for the war between gnawers and humans might have been. 

Imagine the gnawers hiding the survivors, desperately trying to keep their sibling race alive. Imagine the last of the diggers vanishing, going into hiding for fear that they’ll bring this same terrible death upon their siblings’ heads, with no one to know where they’ve gone except the only ones left that they can trust.

Imagine the fliers and the nibblers approaching the newly settled humans, who have built their kingdom on the bodies of the Underland’s once-rulers, whose sovereignty the fliers and nibblers always resented. 

Imagine the nibblers - the next closest thing to gnawers, who wear their faces if not their size - proposing an alliance to the people who killed the gnawers’ siblings, their bonds. Imagine how the gnawers must recoil in grief, to see warped versions of themselves sitting smugly by the sides of humans. Imagine how their grief, their survivors’ guilt, turns inward, goes ugly and festers. Imagine loss becoming loathing, becoming hate. Imagine it getting passed down, turning into the kind of racial grudge that could drive one species to give another no rest in day or night; to allow them no home, because how could they deserve a home, when the diggers did not.

Imagine the fliers proposing even more than that - proposing a bond. After all, they saw how strong it made the diggers and gnawers, how it gave them power over all the Underland. They want to do that, too. They don’t completely understand it, because it wasn’t their tradition, wasn’t part of their culture, wasn’t theirs to give, but they want that power.

Imagine the humans having no idea that this bonding they’re doing now is a cultural tradition going back farther than human memory - stolen from the people they massacred. Imagine the sick grief and fury the gnawers must have felt, seeing the beloved bond they had with their siblings being parodied between the insular, disdainful fliers and these heedless destroyers, these conscienceless  _monsters_ , these  ** _killers_**.

Imagine who might have been the first person to give human beings their Underland name - and why.

Now imagine a world in which, the gnawers - even while desperate, sick and starving, their children dying at their feet, their future hopeless - remember their heritage, their grief, their love, and smuggle precious vials of cure to the diggers.

.

.

.

.

(Now imagine Luxa - queen of Regalia, face and voice of the people who massacred all the gnawers’ bonds, who stole that from them with death and poison and twisted it into a mockery of sacred siblinghood - now imagine her stepping forward, holding up her hand, and saying “I offer this.”)


End file.
